Structuring Buying Options for Wholesale Books

What I’m working on in Week 5

I’m Hillary Dow, the author-illustrator behind Binding Tales. I publish children’s books illustrated with my needle-felted wool artwork, and I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes realities of being an indie publisher week by week.

This week’s focus is wholesale prep. A wholesale show is coming up, and my job right now is to make it easy for a retailer to understand what I offer and how to order it—without me needing to explain everything verbally at the booth.

Beginner-friendly definitions (so we’re using the same language)

• Case pack: A fixed quantity of one product (often aligned with how the manufacturer packs it).

• Bundle: A curated set of multiple items designed with some sort of logic (a convenient ordering option).

• Pick & pack: A custom order where the retailer chooses exact quantities across SKUs.

Why I’m offering three wholesale formats

I’ve been attending prep webinars connected to the New England Made Wholesale Show, and one recommendation that stood out is: make buying as easy as possible. In wholesale, “easy” often means a case pack—one simple decision, one simple reorder.

But here’s the honest truth from my side: as a book publisher, I don’t yet know whether retailers will want to buy full cases in the quantities I receive from the printer, or whether they’ll prefer smaller case packs that I create myself. That distinction matters because it affects labor, packing flow, and how frictionless fulfillment can be.

So instead of forcing one format, I’m meeting buyers where they are with three paths.

Three order options (and how I’m incentivizing them)

1) Pick & pack (custom)

This is the fully custom option. A retailer can choose three hardcovers of one title, five paperbacks of another, and mix formats however they need. It’s flexible—and for some buyers, it’s exactly what they want.

2) Bundles (curated starter sets)

I’m also offering bundles—like a hardcover bundle of all my hardcover books. Bundles are a “starter set” decision: quick to say yes to, and easy to display.

3) Case packs (simple replenishment)

My drafted case packs are 10 of one title in one format. That’s a straightforward reorder model and aligns with the “easy buying” idea.

Prefer the transcription? Here you go!
January 30, 2026

Hello, my name is Hillary Dow. I’m the author, illustrator, and owner of Binding Tales. I’m an indie publisher and this is my vlog, which I am taking you all along on my journey of being an indie publisher and doing all the things that bring my books from a story and my illustrations from farm to bookshelf and then tying it all together to publish children’s books.

So today I am working on a little thin detail on this character here and one of the things that I have been mapping out this past week in preparation for attending a wholesale show is coming up with my approach to packaging different options for wholesale buyers in terms of a case pack, a bundle, or a pick and pack option.

So one of the approaches that has been recommended in the SBDC webinars that I’ve been attending, they partner with the host of the New England Made Wholesale Show to put on a series of webinars that go over determining if you’re ready for wholesale, some of the ways to prepare for the show specifically.

And while there’s a lot of wonderful information, and one of the recommendations is to make the buying options as easy as possible for the people attending the show. And by that, they mean having a case pack offering.

And as a book publisher, what I don’t yet know, I’m going to see what I learn at the show, is if people will want to purchase an entire case of books in the same quantity that I receive a case from the printer versus a case pack that’s a smaller quantity that I’m predetermining and then sending out in that case format.

So I do see that it adds manual labor and that the direct nature of going from my manufacturer packaging directly to a wholesale consumer, I believe is really the ultimate intent and format for a case pack.

However, I’m going to continue to do research before the show, but I think I’ll learn a lot at the show about book purchasing for wholesale buyers. I need to ask more wholesale retailers that incorporate book purchasing in their inventory for wholesale purchasing.

And the show audience at this New England Made show, it’s certainly not all bookstores, it’s retail establishments of all types. So that’s the part that kind of has me curious as to what kind of quantities people will be interested in.

So more to come after the show as I learn what people are looking for and what sells. The way that I have it set up now on my line sheet and catalog is a three-format option. I have a pick and pack stack is what I called it where people can entirely design their own combination of books.

So you might want three of one book in a hardcover, five of that same book in a paperback, and ten of another book in hardcover, and 15 in a paperback. So a complete custom order. Pick and pack. I also put together bundles, so a hardcover bundle of all my hardcover books with an additional discount.

So 50% excuse me, discount for the bundles or case packs and a 40% wholesale discount for the pick and packs. So that’s an incentive to buy more in a case pack or bundle because the discount will be greater.

And so bundles and then case packs are 10 of this book in this format. And it’s 10 of whichever book, whichever format you’re looking for. So that I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’m going to do a bit more research before I send this sales tool to the printer.

That’s the other thing. I’m prepping materials that I need to send to print before the show. So at a certain point here, fairly soon, I need to finalize that, yep, that’s the approach I’m going with and get that off to the printer.

I’m going to pull up this line right here. I don’t love it. It’s a little too thick for me. It’s one of the things I love about felting is it’s easy to take wool off and retool it if you don’t love the way it came out.

And I can pull that apart a little bit. Alright, so another thing that I have been researching and considering in preparation for wholesale is the recommendation of booth design. Actually, I’m going to pull that blob right out of there because I’ve got too much of a little knot of fiber felted together that I don’t love.

Okay. So booth design for wholesale is different than retail in that the goal is to help the retailer see the way my product would appear on the shelves of their shop, in their store. And I’ve been looking at a couple of different shelving options, but I have already invested in the shelving that I used this past year.

I’m going to stick with that. I’m not going to buy more. I’m going to design with what I already have. I also have to store all of these things, so that’s a consideration too, the expense and the storage.

I am also not going to make banner prints of process photographs or originals to hang behind my seat in the back row, the back wall of my booth. Even though they’re not for sale as a wholesale item, I am going to take originals and display them in my booth because I think I’d be foolish not to use one of the tools that is the biggest draw of people pulling them into my booth because when people see my original artwork,

it just pulls them right in. So while not a wholesale option, I would never sell an original with a wholesale discount. That would just be silly. But it doesn’t make any sense to create a photograph of the original when there are photograph replicas of all my pictures in my books.

I already have those. I need the draw and the pull of the content that catches people. It takes your breath away. So here I’ve added some lines to the tail and now I’m going to create a bit of a shape here for the fin that’s going to kind of hang down here and make her look additionally sad.

So I’ll just kind of rough out the shape here as I wrap up this video. So I pull fibers, kind of flatten, pull it off my base, flip it over, flatten, pull the fibers in to create the shape that I’m looking for.

I always keep pulling it off my base because if I don’t, it continues to get felted to the base, my felting pad that I work on. And every time I pull it off, it changes the shape, which I don’t want to have happen as I get further and further into having it be completed, because then it just ruins the shape that I’m trying to achieve.

So I always need to remember to keep pulling it off, flipping it over. And my method is to include three-dimensional components that pop off the illustration. So in this one, her fin helping her to look sad is one of those three-dimensional components.

The composition for the next illustration is going to be Stella over on the left and her tail and the back part of her body will be popping off the illustration and she’ll be looking toward the coral and I think it’s going to having her herself pop off the illustration is going to be pretty striking.

So this is going to come here and it’ll carry these lines down to keep making her look sad. So I’m going to wrap this video up and thank you for joining me along my author-illustrator publisher journey.

I am doing a video a week and sharing all of the things that I have going on, the process that I take. I am launching a Patreon. This will be week five, this video. And if I haven’t just launched Patreon, I’m super close.

So more to come on that. I’m pre-recording these videos, little chunks with a few videos at once because that’s how you do this efficiently. And tips and tricks like that are the types of content that I’ll continue to layer into these vlogs as well as adding more content into my Patreon for members of my community.

So I appreciate you joining along this journey and if you haven’t yet purchased one of my books, I please encourage you and ask that you add a Binding Tales book to your bookshelf and bring joy and beauty into the world every day and find whatever way being creative for you feels right and makes sense because being creative is a fundamental need, I believe, for all of us.

So thanks for listening and I will see you next time.

This week I’m preparing Binding Tales for an upcoming wholesale show by building three wholesale order formats: case pack, bundle, and pick & pack. I share what I’m testing, what I still don’t know yet, and how I’m using discount tiers to make buying simpler. In this episode, I walk through why SBDC/New England Made prep emphasizes “easy buying,” what that means for a book line, and the trade-offs between shipping full manufacturer cases versus creating smaller case packs myself. I also talk about booth design for wholesale—how to help a retailer picture your products on their shelves—and why I’m bringing original fiber artwork as the booth draw.

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